The subject of this bronze has been identified as both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse; it is not a good likeness of either. Baur is not thought to have ventured west before this sculpture was modeled, but little is known of his travels.

From the exhibition:Frontier to Foundry: the Making of Small Bronze Sculpture in the Gilcrease Collection, December 2014 - March 2015.
Ann Boulton Young, Associate Conservator for the Gilcrease Museum, 2014.

The Henry-Bonnard foundry, named for the two French bronze founders who launched it in 1872, was by 1884 operated by another Frenchman, Eugene Aucaigne, who transformed the Manhattan company into the most productive and expert bronze foundry in America during the last 15 years of the nineteenth century. The foreman of the celebrated Barbedienne foundry in Paris was one of many French workers reportedly recruited by Aucaigne.

Although sculptor Paul Bartlett worked with Henry-Bonnard to successfully cast one of his own works in lost wax and had served as liaison for the company’s hiring of French foundry workers, Frederic Remington’s jump to Roman Bronze Works indicates that Henry-Bonnard had little continuing success with lost wax. They continued making sculpture by sand casting until 1926.

From the exhibition:Frontier to Foundry: the Making of Small Bronze Sculpture in the Gilcrease Collection, December 2014 - March 2015.
Ann Boulton Young, Associate Conservator for the Gilcrease Museum, 2014.